Pages

Thursday, July 10, 2014

DIY $20 doll house

A few weeks ago we were in Kmart and our daughter saw a Barbie house that she needed right then or her life would be over. She was pretty adamant about it even thought I informed her that she only had $10 to spend and that we would not front the rest for the plastic pink and purple overpriced "house".

She stood in the isle trying to work the math to make it work but unfortunately she couldn't turn $10 into $37. She made a pretty compelling argument that if she had the house she wouldn't have to mess her room up playing Barbie because they'd have a house of their own. She got me. I told her that I was pretty confident that not only could I make her a really awesome doll house, I could make it with her $10. She was sold!

Later that night we went to Lowe's and came home empty handed. She was bummed and I was frustrated because I just couldn't find the right material in the price range that I had promised her. The next day with hubby in tow we headed back to Lowe's for another look. Hubby found 73 inch long sheets of particle board that were thick enough to be used for a sturdy doll house. Better yet, they were only a little over $5 a piece! We had 3 of those boards cut in half for 36.5 a piece. I came home and assembled the boards into a box with 1 board horizontally through the center. We then went to my mom's and used her jig saw to cut out the doorways for each floor. While there she also gave us some casters to use too. Easy peasy!

I wish I had steps of all of this but you can't take photos while using a jig saw... hubby would frown at that. LOL

I used some squares of peel and stick laminate flooring for the bathroom and kitchen and faux wood flooring sheets for the living room and bedroom. I used leftover house paint for the walls. I really wish I would have painted first and laid the floors down second. That was a bit of a headache but I made it work. I spent 1 day doing all of that but I'm an incredibly slow painter and had to keep cleaning up the paint that I kept spilling on the floor.

Now, on to furnishings! I Googled, Pinterest'd, and YouTubed until my head hurt. I wasn't trying to fill this house with unoriginal plastic furniture. Plus, that's defeating the purpose of the cheap doll house! The most helpful tutorials came from My Froggy Stuff. I will say that I didn't follow most of her tutorials step by step. Sometimes I just got a basic idea and tried to recreate it with different materials. She uses a lot of paper and cardboard (mostly cereal and poptart boxes) where as I used thicker cardboard and popsicle sticks.

I ended up going over her $10 budget but not by much. I bought the frame that I used for the tv, a mirror and a wooden knob so I could make the toilet. I'm overestimating the $20 but close enough. :)

I'm purposely not telling you how to recreate any of this furniture... for now anyway. After finishing her house my son was pretty jealous. He's requested a house for his men and ninja turtles so I'll be working on creating that for him and I'll document the creations a long the way. Until then, here's a few pics of the completed doll house.

*Sorry for the poor quality cell phone pics, I didn't consider I'd be blogging this at the time.*